Ukrainian parliament member: Putin won’t succeed because we are fighting for our lives

The West finds itself on the horns of a dilemma over the Ukraine war.

Publicly and privately, it insists that it wants a Ukrainian victory — and it has backed up its stance with billions of dollars of military assistance and humanitarian aid. But dig deeper and some real doubts emerge.

Yes, the United States, United Kingdom, and European Union all want Kyiv to triumph. But at the same time, they fear a Russian defeat. To borrow from the poet Alexander Pope, they are willing to wound, but afraid to strike.

As a member of the Ukrainian parliament from Odesa, I have just spent a few days in Washington seeking to enlist more support for my beleaguered country. We now face the cruel rigors of winter and the modern version of medieval siege warfare with Vladimir Putin, who is seeking to starve and freeze us into submission.

He won’t succeed, not least because more than 40 million of us know we are fighting for our lives and the very existence of our country.

But what struck me in the States (and before this in Europe, too) was that not far beneath the surface, there lurks a primal fear of what Putin might do next. A cornered, desperate Putin, faced with a humiliating and career-ending defeat — what might he do? What horrors might he unleash, not just on Ukraine but on what we call the civilized world?

» READ MORE: Putin’s threat to use nukes is a sure sign his war is failing | Trudy Rubin

He has stoked this fear repeatedly and deliberately. He has said that if the West were to use troops against the Russian army, that could lead to a “global catastrophe” and, in a clear reference to nuclear weapons, he has said this: “If the territorial integrity of our country is threatened, we will, without question, use all the means at our disposal to protect Russia and our people. This is not a bluff.”

In issuing these cataclysmic threats, Putin’s objectives are clear: to cow Western public opinion and its political leadership into submission. He believes the West is decadent and weak and that by ramping up the specter of nuclear annihilation, he can frighten the U.S., the U.K., and the countries of the EU into dialing down their military support for Ukrainian forces and cutting back on their economic and humanitarian aid.

So far, it hasn’t worked like Putin hoped. NATO may have held off direct confrontation with Russia, but its military support of Ukraine is strong. Recently, it was reported that hundreds of Russian soldiers were killed when precision-guided U.S.-supplied rockets fired by Ukrainian forces hit a barracks in Melitopol.

That said, Putin’s constant bluffing keeps the West from being more decisive and finishing the war much quicker. And by “finishing the war,” I mean the complete liberation of Ukrainian territories, including the Donbas and Crimea, and a restoration of international law and order.

A combination of Ukrainian skill and bravery on the battlefield and Western firepower is making this scenario possible.

» READ MORE: Into the War Zone: In four decades covering wars, I’ve never seen anything like Ukraine. | Trudy Rubin

To the world’s amazement, Putin is losing a war he was expected to win within weeks. His dreams of taking Kyiv are long gone, he has abandoned Kherson, one of his few major gains in the war, and he is being pushed back just about every day.

Our people keep fighting because we know the alternative is unthinkable. If Putin is allowed to secure the Donbas and/or Crimea, he will be able to rearm Russian forces at his leisure and then resume his cruel attacks on the rest of my country. He will also be encouraged to menace Ukraine’s allies, such as Poland, Moldova, Romania, and the Baltic states. The whole of Eastern Europe would be destabilized by a Putin victory, almost certainly extending the war to other lands.

As for Putin’s threats to use nuclear weapons, their deployment is another, even grimmer version of defeat. He would lose what tacit support he might have from China and India and minor states in the global south. And his second-rate military would face a ferocious response from NATO — almost certainly a conventional attack that would destroy Russian forces in Ukraine.

Putin is in a trap of his own making. His choices are very limited. The main challenge now is to save international order and security by giving a lesson to any authoritarian leaders who embark on this kind of aggression that the free world is strong enough, unified enough, and committed enough to stop them.

Oleksii Goncharenko is a member of the Ukrainian parliament from Odesa. He also serves as vice president of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe’s Committee on Migration, Refugees and Internally Displaced Persons.